Re: Are Gaiters Really Necessary?
Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2012 6:43 amseano wrote:Stylin'!mvs wrote:I remember on early starts in the PNW that I'd knock about 6 liters of water off the plants as I ascended a trail.
Indeed, that sucks -- get soaked on the approach trail, then get frozen by the wind above treeline. But based on my limited experience getting PWNed in the PNW, I would want something more like rain pants, since the teeming dew-infested undergrowth was rarely only knee-high. How do you people deal with that stuff?
How do we deal with it?
We bitch all the way up the trail or cower in our sleeping abode and bitch about not being on the trail as you are a self avowed pansy. Or, curse yourself for being so stupid as to take this trail non maintained trail instead of the trail that sees maintenance every year or every 5th year. Wait it was shorter... Right?
After being dumb and buying expensive rain gear, putting it on, and trekking up the trail only to find holes in your sparkling cool dude brand new gear from those damned Salmonberry bushes, or devils club, or shreds it on some stick, one quickly learns to buy the cheapest leggings/shorts/long sleeved T possible, with gaitors on and GRIN[G] and bear it. Break out of the brush into the alpine sun, exhale, strip off the soaking wet junk, wring it out, put it back on and keep on climbing.
By the way Montana and British Columbia are just as bad though the brush is lower. If you have ever tried off trail through the lush rain forests of British Columbia or Washington/Oregon that hasn't been logged, it makes the stuff in the PNW mountains look like a picnic. Though it makes up for it in some of the most luxurious beautiful moss infested, mushroom in fested, plant infested beauty you will ever witness. You quickly learn that the fastest way to move is to find the thickest bunch of trees no matter how cliff banded and steep and hug them as any ravine bottom, ridge top, or anything that looks like LIGHT, is Hell on earth to pass through.
What we get for this? Beautiful glaciers, lakes, streams, and FLOWERS. TONS of flowers. Parts of Colorado has this as well due to the afternoon thunderstorms watering the flowering meadows.
Pants and hiking DO NOT MIX unless you are a martian with pencil legs and pencil arms and you don't sweat. If you are an average human being, then pants and hiking means you are sweating buckets of sweat making your life miserable. So, shorts are the name of the game and getting loads of water, twigs, heather scum, dust, and pebbles in your socks is a PITA. At least when I take the gaitors off, my socks and shoes are clean though soaked in sweat instead of soaked in sweat and filled with crud destroying socks and shoes in the process all in the name of extra ventilation. If lots of trail walking shorty gaitors work great. They should weigh about 40g if you make them yourself.
